Why? Motivation

Recent years have seen an enormous growth in the discovery of tidal streams in the Milky Way with nearly 100 known streams today. This unprecedented data set provides an avenue to study some of the first stars in the Universe and presents some of the most stringent tests of the dark-matter paradigm. To deliver on these goals, a homogeneous catalog of all known Milky Way tidal streams is needed as identified by the community during the Streams21 online workshop.


What? Workshop scope

The aim of the Streams22 workshop is to produce the first Community Atlas of Tidal Streams (CATS😺). This atlas will include detailed membership probabilities of individual stars for each known stream in the Milky Way. To achieve this goal, we are looking to bring together experts in the discovery, characterisation, and modeling of tidal streams to take part in an interactive and collaborative workshop.

This is intended to be a working meeting and not a traditional conference. At the end of the workshop we hope to release the first version of the CATS atlas on the arXiv, containing not only individual stream members, but also the methods and procedures for generating the atlas. Our plan is to also host the atlas on Flathub and thus provide to provide easy interface to access the Milky Way streams data.


What next? Legacy

This workshop is the second in the series after the highly-successful Streams21 online workshop. Indeed, the focus of this follow-up workshop was borne out of ideas shared at Streams21. We hope this workshop will itself lead to new ideas and research directions. During this workshop we plan to keep a written record of the discussions through a collaborative Google Doc and develop the CATS Atlas as a community-driven product.

In the longer term we would like to continue this topical meeting series, so stay tuned about future announcements, or get in touch if you would like to propose ideas for future meetings or to help coordinate these meetings.

Here is a page with documents and data products produced during the workshop.